


tsunami tides in my eyes

by thegoodyouth



Category: BBC Radio 1 RPF, One Direction (Band)
Genre: M/M, nick and louis are really sad???, there's a bit of smoking and a mention of alcohol i think, there's some ziam if you squint really hard, this is just a glorified amount of angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-01
Updated: 2015-07-01
Packaged: 2018-04-06 16:18:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4228572
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegoodyouth/pseuds/thegoodyouth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The prompt was "You can go anywhere you want with this, but based off the Ed Sheeran song U.N.I." and I just saw a lot of angst.</p>
            </blockquote>





	tsunami tides in my eyes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [littlepinkbow](https://archiveofourown.org/users/littlepinkbow/gifts).



> I didn't follow the song 100% so I hope this interpretation is okay!!

There was a lone t-shirt on the floor.

Louis picked it up gingerly with his right index finger, just in case it was apparel that had been abandoned several weeks ago and was capable of transmitting some sort of rare illness to him - this _was_ university, after all. 

It wasn't as he'd suspected, however; in fact, it was something much worse.

The artefact in question was a band t-shirt Louis had bought for Nick during the first few months of their relationship, when everything had been too good to be true. The imprint on the shirt was too faint and blurred out from being worn and washed too much, but Louis still recognised it and more than that, he recognised Nick’s clear and distinct smell. The sudden memory caused Louis to drop the piece of cloth, blinking twice to steady himself and return to the grimy present.

He made a sad face and had only just begun to compose himself when the door to his bedroom banged open. It was Zayn, all dressed up and with a grin firm on his face. "Oi, Lou, I've been looking for you. Got a party to get to." 

It was the first time since the break up that someone had actually talked to Louis without being overly cautious and afraid of overstepping a line that didn't even exist in the first place; it had been odd and stilted up until that point, so it was somewhat nice to see a return to normalcy - even if Louis was slightly suspicious of where Zayn wanted to drag him off to.

It would be a massive relief when this all finally blew over so Louis could once again enjoy life without doubting everything and everyone's intentions.

"Alright, mate, just give me a second here," he replied, nodding back at the mess of a bedroom he was currently standing inside. Louis paused for a second after the words had already left his mouth and just shook his head instead. "Actually, on second thought, let's go." He grabbed his jacket and keys off of the nearest bed where he'd unceremoniously dumped the entire contents of his pockets earlier and followed after the other male "to wherever destiny took them", as Liam would so aptly put if he had been around to witness this scene.

-

The party was less than impressive and Louis was bored within half an hour; he walked straight back out and leaned against the wall beside the open door, a cigarette already in his hand. It wasn’t long before he was joined by a slightly confused looking Liam. “Where’s Louis ‘party animal’ Tomlinson?” he asked, sliding in right beside him. There was complete silence for a moment - unless you counted the noise coming from the room behind them, which Liam was conveniently ignoring - before he looked Louis full in the face. 

Louis was too busy cringing at the nickname.

"This is about Nick, innit?"

There was a pause as Louis stopped his cigarette in midair just as it had been travelling the distance towards his mouth for another pull. "Is that relevant?" he replied, finally getting the cigarette back in his mouth and frowning when he blew out the smoke - Louis had been trying to make smoke rings, without success, for a while now.

“Yes, because you’re obviously miserable and it’s...you can talk to me or Zayn about it, you know that.” No reply. “I know how much you loved him and how close...you...were...” Louis was glaring at him. “Li, can we not talk about this?” he snapped out, looking extremely uncomfortable and on the verge of scurrying away from the scene before the heartfelt interrogation could get any worse. “I haven’t even talked to him since the day,” he confessed. It was something he hadn’t told anyone, not even when he made the trip back home and broke down in tears in front of his mother. “This isn’t something you can fix, Liam,” he added in a quiet voice, as if he was mourning that very fact.

This silence that followed felt like an itch that's hard to scratch because of how impossible it is to get to it no matter how hard you try - and that was exactly how Louis felt about this whole situation: no matter how much he tried to reach across the void and grasp what was once his, all his attempts fell flat at the very last second. He didn't even know how Nick was handling this; breaking up after a year and a half of trying to turn their relationship into something that wasn't simply casual and a gimmick. 

It was easy until it wasn't, that's why they had stuck with it for so long.

He really needed to call Nick.

It wasn’t a very difficult decision, considering, but everything leading up to that moment had felt stale, like there was a bad taste in the air no matter where he went and Louis was no longer sure why he had ever dated Nick in the first place. There was something to be said about the revelations and epiphanies that happened once you stopped avoiding everything that was wrong with the way your world was turning.

It took a minute before he could speak properly. “I need to go,” he said, voice scratchy like it hadn’t been used in a long time. He didn’t say anything else, but Liam was giving him a knowing look and Louis was absolutely certain that the man next to him was well aware of the thoughts currently slip-sliding through his mind; Liam always knew. Dropping the cigarette that had gone out by now, Louis high-tailed it out of there, the itch suddenly growing stronger under his bare arms.

-

The last time he and Nick had exchanged words, everything had been rushed and heated, fire falling fast from their lips in an attempt to outdo one another, but it had eventually ended with them on the floor, whispering reassurances into each other’s skin, promising to be okay even without the promise of a morning kiss to soothe away any and all chills brought in with the early breeze.

Of course, in retrospect, they had both been lying.

The phone was ringing for what felt like hours, and it sent Louis pacing through his room - a room that was still cluttered with the remnants of the past all laid out for him to pick through at will. He really needed to throw everything out eventually.

The dial tone was driving Louis right up the wall and he had the strongest urge to just chuck the phone against the wall and find bitter satisfaction in watching it fall apart just like he was about to at any second now.

He reigned it in, however, and before he knew it, there was a tired voice quipping out a quick greeting on the other end. There was a tense silence for a moment longer as Louis tried to sort out his thoughts. He was mentally cursing himself for not thinking of this prior to making the call; perhaps he should have written down a speech or something so he wouldn’t make an arse out of himself like he was currently doing without a doubt.

“Louis?” Nick let out after an audible pause that only made Louis suck in his breath even more. He wasn’t sure why he thought doing this over the phone would be a good idea, but he was already having difficulty pushing down the guilt that had suddenly popped up out of nowhere.

He finally grit his teeth together and let out an almost silent “yeah, it’s me” before he was once again out of vocabulary to use for this conversation. Man, did he suck. Louis pulled in a deep breath, perfectly aware that Nick had probably heard it over the airwaves and was two seconds away from hanging up on him, thinking this was just some sort of drunk call - ironically enough, Louis had been trying to get drunk almost half an hour before dialing the number that had once been more familiar to him than his own.

As usual, however, Nick was patient and didn’t hang up on him and his internal monologue. Clearly, he had already forgotten a whole bunch of important things.

“I wanted to...talk,” he finally got out, wincing slightly at the choice of words. They were talking, after all; the pair of them would have deleted each other’s numbers if it had been a case of bitterness and spite between them. Instead, they were like burnt out lovers that no longer found pleasure in each other’s company.

They had tried to stick through it, though, and it only let out a few sparks and nothing more.

“About what?”

Louis ignored the obvious tension in the words, feeling like this conversation was just dragging on and it hadn’t even started yet. He was awful at this, at the whole relationship thing. He was awful at making people feel appreciated until it was too late, but something told Louis that he hadn’t been completely at fault here. “About us,” he replied, frowning at the wall, momentarily forgetting that Nick couldn’t see the various facial expressions that were playing out on his face.

There was a suffocating sort of silence for exactly half a minute - Louis counted - before Nick finally let out a breath that he had clearly been holding for longer than that. “This isn’t something we can talk about on the phone, you know,” he said, voice perfectly accentuated with what Louis was certain was a raised eyebrow.

“Yeah, yeah, ‘course I knew that, I just didn’t want to knock on your door and be all ‘oi, Nick, let’s talk about the big elephant in the room, yeah?’” He didn’t want to sound annoyed at the man on the other end of the phone because there wasn’t even anything there to feel annoyed about, but he couldn’t help the sourness from colouring his words with an embarrassing amount of clarity.

“That hasn’t stopped you before, has it, now?” He was mocking him, and Louis reckoned he was supposed to rise to the bait and fire back something equally, if not more, scathing that would turn this into a proper fight because that’s how these things usually went. He didn’t have it in him to fight, though, especially since he genuinely missed Nick and wanted to go back to being friends again.

He also really wanted to kiss him, but that was of absolutely no consequence at the moment.

“Nick, I don’t want to fight,” he let out, already exhausted from the effort of acting like it wasn’t affecting him to the extent that it was. Louis slid to the ground, using his phone as an anchor to pull himself down. The floor was still messy, so it was a while before he was comfortable enough to pay attention to the failure of a conversation he was trying to have with his ex-boyfriend. Limbs slightly flailing, Louis had to make sure he hadn’t accidentally hung up on Nick.

He needn’t have bothered, however, because a moment later Nick started talking fast, not pausing even for a second to breathe, and the only thing Louis managed to catch was that Nick was busy with work or something but he was more than willing to talk about this face-to-face instead of trying to awkwardly figure out what was being said through the static white noise of the telephone.

“-facial expressions are important,” was the end of that diatribe, and Louis blinked back into existence, left dazed and confused, and wondering how that information was relevant to this particular conversation. Instead of questioning it, however, he just nodded to himself and hummed quietly before raising his voice to a reasonable volume. “So, tomorrow good for ya?” He asked, anticipation already welling up in his chest. It wasn’t good anticipation, though, and that realisation caused Louis to sharply swallow down on the bile that had been threatening to spill over his lips and into Nick’s ears.

“Yeah, I’ll see you at the ‘Bucks,” Nick finally replied, and it sounded more like a dismissal than anything else; it was the last thing he thought he would ever hear from him. “Okay, yeah, yeah, I’ll talk to you then,” he said, before swiftly hanging up the phone and wiping his sweaty hand on his jeans before this situation could get even more unpleasant.

He just hoped Liam or Zayn wouldn’t ask him about this, because if it was this bad having to deal with it alone, he could only imagine what it would be like in the presence of company.

-

It started raining the minute Louis stepped foot outside; he had never been prone to being overly superstitious, but the recent string of bad luck bestowed upon him made him wonder whether or not he ought to reconsider his stance on that. It was a long way to the local Starbucks - a long way in the rain, anyways - that he and Nick had deemed ‘theirs’ during the higher times of their relationship, but Louis simply shrugged to himself and pulled up the hood of his jacket, hitching it ever so slightly higher up his back in the process.

He sure hoped this whole escapade would get better by the time Nick came into view and this wouldn’t turn into yet another bad decision that would then follow him around and plague him for months.

It seemed almost routine at this point.

Upon entering the establishment, Louis quickly found an empty spot, doing his best to remain inconspicuous - not that he was likely to run into anyone he knew here, but it was still always a good idea to remain vigilant.

He didn't have to wait long before the door opened and instead of some lone stranger, this time it was Nick, looking just as sunny as he always did, even if there was a slight frown currently marring his features.

"Louis," he let out upon catching sight of the other man and slightly squinting, allowing the frown to deepen even further. There was something uneasy in Nick's eyes that was starting to make Louis feel nervous and he wished more than anything he was standing rather than doing the perfect imitation of a sitting duck.

Nick approached the table, and the dread in the pit of Louis' stomach just continued to grow, suddenly feeling sticky like tar.

Just like that, everything he had mentally rehearsed for this particular meeting flew straight out of his head.

He didn't have any time to recollect himself, however, because before he could even blink, Nick was seated across from him and staring at him, that frown still embedded deep between his eyebrows. It occurred to Louis that neither of them had bothered to get something to drink, and he briefly wondered whether or not this was a cause for alarm.

In an attempt to unstick his throat, he cleared it rather loudly, drawing several curious and annoyed glances from nearby tables and booths. "I thought it best to talk about this..." he vaguely gestured between the two of them before continuing. "...being over, because we haven't really talked at all since you decided to walk out on me."

As soon as the words left Louis' mouth, he instantly regretted it - it was cruel and unnecessary, and it wasn't even all that true in the first place, something Nick was quick to point out. "Do you remember why I walked out in the first place?" There was anger brewing just beneath the surface, and it was palpable in the silence that followed the question.

They shouldn't have done this in public.

"I didn't mean it like that. I...it just sort of fell apart," Louis frowned, doing his best to ignore the agitated and incessant tapping Nick was currently administering to the small bit of space between them on the table.

The truth was that Louis still hadn't moved on and he was terrified that Nick had already moved on to the stage of acceptance in the process of their shared grief. The problem was that neither of them would admit to it, choosing - and preferring - to mask their true feelings in indifference.

This is what their relationship had been like, and Louis was honestly sick and tired of it.

"Louis, we weren't working. You and I, we were a complete disaster whenever we were together," he paused, staring intently at the man in front of him. "You said you were okay with it."

"I lied, alright? Is that what you wanna hear?" His voice was clipped, dragging his accent further north until it felt like he would choke on his own vocal chords.

They really shouldn't have done this here.

There was stunned silence, during which Nick took the time to sufficiently gawp at Louis before quickly turning his face away to gnaw painfully at his bottom lip. It was a whole minute before he had regained enough composure to speak.

"Is that what this is all about, Louis?" He was speaking in a much quieter and softer tone; the kind of tone one adopts at a sick bed or when reassuring a small child that Santa does, in fact, exist.

When he didn't reply, Nick barrelled on regardless. "This isn't...I don't know what you want from me," he said, dropping his shoulders helplessly. He was flooded with vivid images of the night they broke up: hot tears cascading down both their cheeks, and holding on to the notion that this was a mutual decision.

The kiss they'd shared just before parting said otherwise.

"I don't want you to say anything, I just wanted to talk," Louis replied, eyes shut in a vain hope to block out the frustrated and helpless expression currently on Nick's face, well aware of the contradiction he'd just uttered. "I just miss you, is all," he finally confessed, voice quiet. He wasn't sure if this was the first time he'd admitted to it, but it was certainly the first time it hit him this hard.

Louis took a deep breath and finally opened his eyes, only to find a crestfallen version of Nick looking straight at him; he had seen this Nick way too many times over the course of their relationship. It hadn’t been pleasant then, and it certainly wasn’t pleasant now.

The urban legend that said it was pretty much impossible to remain friends with your ex was starting to look more and more true as the seconds ticked by, permanently engraining their scars across Louis' heart. It was a sick, long minute before Nick had gathered himself enough to respond.

"I miss you too, Louis," he said it quietly, as if trying to soothe a child's open wound. "But that doesn't change that in the end, we just didn't work out, mate," he continued, flicking his eyes upwards to quickly glance at Louis.

"And being around you just brings back old memories and feelings," Nick added delicately, now purposely avoiding eye contact with the man in front of him.

This conversation was starting to feel repetitive and it was making Louis feel anxious. He briefly wondered whether this was how it had always been when him and Nick were together, but he dismissed that thought as soon as it arrived - their relationship had been great while it lasted; the fact that they had slipped into quicksand that sent them into complete and total disarray didn't change that.

"So, what now?" There was a stale smell entering his lungs every time he took a breath, and he couldn't keep the desperation of off his face and out of his tone. "Are we just never gonna go back to being mates again?"

The words had already left Louis' mouth, but he was starting to feel like the pair of them were walking down a dead end alley where nothing would ever be resolved; they were stuck in a maze where they just kept going round and round in circles.

The pained expression on Nick's face more than confirmed that.

He pitied him his grievances, and even if Nick hadn't completely moved on, he was clearly dealing with it a lot better than Louis was; Nick was fine, but Louis was not.

"It's not-" Nick had only just opened his mouth to continue when a phone nearby started ringing very loudly and urgently. It took Louis a few seconds to realise it was actually _his_ phone, and he quickly shot Nick an apologetic look before pulling it out of his pocket and answering it without even taking a second to check who it was.

"Liam, hey! Yeah, I'm busy right now," he nodded along to the voice currently prattling off in his ears, very aware of the fact that Nick was staring at him rather intensely. It was making him slightly uncomfortable, but Louis did his best to not give himself away.

He kept getting distracted from the phone call, his eyes casually sliding to the finger that Nick was still tapping on the small bit of space in front of him. He didn't seem impatient at all, but there was a persistent frown creasing his forehead, as if he was both staring at Louis and deep in thought.

It was a minute before the phone call finally ended and Louis was sliding his phone back into his pocket.

"That was Liam," he paused as Nick nodded in acknowledgement, urging him on, evidently curious to hear what was going on. "Apparently the washer's broken again so he's taking all our clothes down to the laundromat." This seemed like a simple enough sentence about a simple enough occurrence - university aged lads living together in a cheap flat just off campus, constantly breaking their household appliances over and over again. Louis was pretty sure Nick had already heard about the time their fridge stopped working and everyone banded together to bring them food so no one would starve.

It was all very simple and familiar and routine, but it felt a bit off to talk about it in front of Nick, who had essentially been reduced to a stranger after the break up.

"Sad, innit? We used to do the laundry together," Louis said, a sad smile clear on his face. "It had become our thing, to the point where everyone in the flat always asked us to get theirs done too."

"Louis..." his voice sounded wary, but also extremely knackered at the same time. It was too much for Louis.

"What do you want me to do, Nick, tell me. Forget we ever happened, forget everything we ever shared?" His voice was shaking and he knew everyone in the vicinity could hear it, which meant the man sitting directly in front of him could as well. Louis furiously blinked back tears that were finally threatening to spill over. "It's not that easy, it's not..."

There was a silence after that, as Louis tried to figure out a way to properly explain himself and Nick was quietly feeling guilty; he was still in the middle of moving on - perhaps even in the same place as Louis, even - but he didn't want to admit to it.

He had always been afraid of wearing his heart on his sleeve like Louis did.

"Louis, maybe we just need some distance to figure this shit out," he said, breaking the silence and startling them both out of their thoughts. "This'll just get worse if we keep trying to find some way to patch things up." He didn't voice the thought that maybe there was nothing left to patch up, anyways.

There was a painful expression on Louis' face; he was gritting his teeth, as if attempting to keep himself from disagreeing with everything that had just left Nick's mouth. He was certain that wouldn't really help matters at all.

"Is that..." he started, then stopped. "Okay, yeah, you're right." He swallowed thickly, resigned to go back to the dark cloud that had been following him around ever since they'd decided to finally call it quits, refusing to keep dragging their limp bodies everywhere.

As soon as the word had left Louis' lips, Nick was already getting back on his feet, aiming for a quick dash out the door.

"See you later?" Louis asked quickly, before Nick had the chance to escape. He hated feeling this vulnerable, but he had no other way to convey how much this was still hurting him.

"Sure." 

And just like that, Louis was all alone at an empty table.

-

“He ain’t gonna call, y’know?”

Louis looked up from the staring contest he’d been having with his phone and blinked rapidly. “I...I know,” he replied, world coming back into focus.

It had been a week since talking to Nick, and whatever distance they were trying to put between each other just kept getting bigger. At this rate, they would never even see each other again - but he knew Zayn was right. “Yeah, man, it’s just...it’s hard,” he swallowed heavily and turned his gaze on his friend instead and shrugged.

Louis was grateful for the lack of commentary this time 'round; being ambushed by his two best friends with questions like 'do we need to call someone in?' and 'want us to pour beer down your throat?' hadn't been fun the first time and it definitely wouldn't be fun if he was put to the test again.

“Wanna pop ‘round to the pub and see what’s up?” He asked, picking up the t-shirt that still smelt eerily like Nick. At Zayn’s assent, he opened the door and dropped it in the middle of the corridor, sliding his hands into his jean pockets as he matched his pace to Zayn’s.

He still loved Nick, though; that’s all he knew.


End file.
